The friendly, neighborhood weblog written for the unusual by the unusual. I am your host, Lightning Man.
Here we'll discuss my journey as a recovering adult child of an alcoholic, as well as politics, popular culture, American sports, and pulchritudinous females.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

“Oh, won't you take me home tonight...?”

One of the most fascinating things about the touch of alcoholism is all the different places in your life it can leave an imprint. It can mess with your self confidence. It can mess with your spontaneity. It can mess with your levels of acceptance. And apparently it can mess with your weight and who you like.

One of the things that you do as you go through the ACoA program is make a chart or tree of your family, both your parents and grandparents, your siblings, and your spouse and children. Under each person you label if they have any of a number of conditions. Alcoholism, of course, but other such things as rage issues and, yes, obesity.

From my time in regular therapy I already knew that female obesity has more than once been linked to abuse. It also appears the addictive nature of the ACoA personality lends itself to overeating, even if the only abuse from the alcoholism was being around it. Being an ACoA apparently has to manifest itself in some way in your life, and that is one of the ways.

As to it affecting who you like, for straight people it has been said that you imprint off of your opposite sex parent. Either you seek someone very much like that parent or you try to find someone as diametrically opposite as possible. And as an ACoA, since we try to replicate the dynamic of our FOO, chances are good that if your have an obese opposite sex parent, you'll have an obese opposite sex spouse.

These, of course, are not hard and fast rules. But it explains some things about choices that I have made, factors in my decisions that I was not actually aware of. And just being aware may make all the difference the next time.